View full sizeAndrew Mills/The Star-LedgerJoe Grano, chief executive of Centurion Holdings, arrives on the red carpet for the Green Beret Foundation's annual gala at the Pierre Hotel in New York City earlier this month. The New Jersey Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Foundation honored him Friday night.

HARDING — Joe Grano is at that point in life where, in his words, he doesn’t have to put up with any ……

Well, we can’t print his words.

But that’s Joe Grano. Straight. Blunt. Forceful. Usually right.

Like the time, against most advice, he backed a Broadway play about a nearly forgotten singing group from the 1960s. "Jersey Boys" is still rolling with Joe Grano listed as producer.

"He’s a great leader," said Bob Zito, who’s known Grano more than 25 years, since both worked on Wall Street. "If people know he is part of something, they want to be around it. That’s the kind of aura the guy has."

In the full spectrum of American legend, Joe Grano, 64, who lives in New Vernon, has been many. Self-made man. Green Beret war hero. Wall Street financial leader. Crisis manager, in the crisis of all crises.

All of those things are the reason Joe Grano was honored by the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Foundation during a gala Friday night at the Vietnam Era Museum and Educational Center in Holmdel.

Bill Linderman, the museum’s executive director, said the selection of Grano was easy.

"The committee looks for a really outstanding Vietnam veteran, someone who served with honor in war and went on to be extremely successful," he said. "Joe Grano has done all that."

It is the second such honor for Grano in as many weeks. Last Wednesday he was honored by the Green Beret Foundation at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan.

"My life exemplifies the American dream," said Grano, now the chairman and CEO of Centurion Holdings, which, in his words, "helps companies, public and private, get to the next level.

"We’re not consultants in that we don’t take a fee," he said. "We’re strategic planners who get paid through equity participation. We become partners with other shareholders."

This from a man who turned PaineWebber’s $250 million losses into $1.2 billion profits more than a decade ago, and merged the company with Swiss investment giant USB. He left in 2003, before some of the company’s well-publicized ethical breaches.

"Wall Street has lost its moral compass. The ethics are non-existent; the clients no longer come first," Grano laments. "In my company, we have three rules before we take on a company. One, we have to like what they do, ethically and otherwise. Two, we can make money. And three, they have to be (expletive) free, which is really Rule 1."

Joe Grano’s American dream began on the streets of Hartford, Conn., on the south side, which was the Italian section. It was a place where the smells and sounds of the old world underscored the promise and opportunities of the new one.

"My father worked construction 70 hours a week," said Grano, the oldest in a family of six boys.

His father was also a master sergeant in the U.S. Army, serving for nine years in and around World War II.

"In my family, and the environment I grew up in, serving in the military wasn’t only a duty, it was a privilege," Grano said.

Perhaps that’s why he saw Vietnam as a "popular war" back in 1967, when he dropped out of Central Connecticut State to enlist in the army.

"I was studying to be a math teacher, but me and a couple of buddies decided to enlist," he said. "It was a popular war then, to me. The bifurcation came later, when people saw the body bags piling up on TV."

Grano was chosen for officer training and the Green Beret. He spent the first years of his enlistment "playing with Castro and the boys" during covert operations based in Panama. In 1971, he was sent to Vietnam and took command of Company A of the 198th Infantry Division, a battered fighting unit. As the youngest captain in Vietnam, he taught those soldiers the Green Beret way.

"Captain Grano took the weakest rifle company within the battalion and, has, in a short period of time developed it into the strongest," his superior officer, Maj. Edwin Mitts, wrote in 1971. "His company was consistently the most successful of all companies engaged in combat operations."

He was wounded by the Vietnam version of the IED — a grenade tied to a 105-mm artillery round. His citation for the Bronze Star with a "V" for valor, says Grano nearly had his left leg and left arm blown off, but he was still able to rescue several of his men, and performed CPR on some of them with one arm.

In his 2009 book, "You Can’t Predict a Hero," Grano recounts the episode with the same humility that marks the Green Beret. "Quiet Professionals" is their unofficial motto.

"Anybody who brags about what they did in combat has never been in combat," he likes to say.

After 9/11, the country came calling again. President Bush asked him to chair the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

"He had been very vocal about the need for an organized homeland security effort," said Zito, who now runs Zito Partners, a consulting group. "It’s part of his passion for this country and what it stands for. You know, at every event Joe hosts, at the end of the night, he has everybody stand and sing ‘America the Beautiful.’ It’s his favorite song."